Let's do life together!

Day 18

Adoption is something that has been huge on my heart since I was a little girl. I have always thought it was one of the most beautiful pictures of love and unconditional acceptance.

When I was 13-ish I read the book Choosing To See, by Mary Beth Chapman, and that took my love for adoption to a whole new level and made me want our family to be involved in it. Ever since then I have been praying and hinting towards my parents that we should adopt… and as of tomorrow, they will officially be legal adoptive parents of the cutest little 6 year old ever! Below is a post I wrote a few months ago that really sums up my heart in all of this. I hope you all are inspired by love and enjoy seeing this little part of my heart!

“Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth” – Isaiah 43:6

“They came to see that family need not be defined merely as those with whom they share blood, but for those for whom they would give their blood.” – Charles Dickens

Those two quotes are some of what our family’s adoption process has taught me. We are all orphans, wandering through life Fatherless and God comes to bring his sons and daughters from the ends of the earth. There is nothing quite like looking at a random stranger and loving them enough to die for them, and yet that is adoption. Unconditional love. I fail at loving basically at least every minute of every day, and yet God has chosen us to show what it looks like to love to the nations and I believe one of the most powerful tools he uses is adoption. We knew the people at the market, our landlord, our house helper, our mechanic, and yes, we were kind and they were kind back, but everything changed when we brought Ty around. Suddenly we weren’t just nice people, we were people who loved their people. We were people who opened our home to “bad luck”, (their explanation of why the child was orphaned) and called him a gift. That is when it all switched. That is when I truly fell in love with Thailand. Not just the beaches, not just the food, not just the flowers or trees, not just the cute children, but the nation itself. That is when I truly realized, all they want is to be loved. They are the sex trafficking hub of the world, they are known for cheating on their spouses as a generally accepted thing, they are huge into alcohol and drugs, they are entrenched in Buddhism…and in those first few outings with Ty, I somehow didn’t see that, they were simply a people who were thirsty for love and nothing they tried has filled it. They are in need of a God who rescues His sons and Daughters from afar and calls them beloved.